What Makes You Stare So, Bufflehead?

November visits upon New York dank, leaden chill and multitudes of ducks. I vastly prefer the latter, particularly those species that don’t frequent this area during the warmer months. One beloved bird to keep an eye out for is the Bufflehead, a beauty in black and white. Bufflehead are fascinating little creatures. They are exceptional divers and, unlike other diving ducks, can take off from the water without running along the surface. There are all kinds of interesting facts about this species, and yet, a mere listing of its many estimable traits will naturally fail to address the question which is doubtless on everybody’s lips: What’s with that name?

Female Bufflehead (Bufflehen?!) by Corey Finger

The tale of Bucephala albeola is a long one indeed, with as many twists and turns as the Pacific Coast Highway. Called petit garrot in French and hime-ha-jiro ‘princess white-wing’ by the Japanese, the bufflehead has seen a number of name changes here in the U. S. of A. Even its Latin name is not its first; for some reason, it was formerly named Choritonetta albeola.

Bufflehead comes from the now archaic word buffle, meaning ‘buffalo.’ Bufflehead is the condensed version of ‘Buffalo Head’, the name these ducks were originally given. I suppose the densely feathered, black and white head of the drake does slightly resemble a buffalo’s head. These birds have also been called buffel duck, spirit duck, and butterball. That’s a long list for a little bird.

Female Bufflehead by Larry Jordan
(Have you ever seen a Bufflehead search for a nesting cavity? Larry has.)

A bufflehead may be cute on waterfowl, but it garners much less respect on Homo sapiens. Predictably, the term can be used to describe someone who has a large head or, alternately, a heavy, stupid fellow. The title of this post is a line attributed to Plautus, a renowned playwright of ancient Rome, one I suspect that wasn’t directed towards a duck.

Bufflehead by Mike Bergin

(I first wrote about Buffleheads in November 2006 but haven’t seen the term spread as an insult in the general vernacular yet. Let’s make it work this time!)

Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.

We live on a small lake in southern Michigan (Jackson). We get a large gathering every spring estimated around seventy. Not only do they arrrive at about the same date, but in the exact same location on the lake. They are here for aproximately one week. Very active!

Fellow worker spotted these cute little guys floating and diving on local Mosquito Creek in Northeastern Ohio, just the other day. We searched and found a bunch of the buffleheads feeding in the stream. Just 4 days ago I spotted a Bald Eagle flying over the creek in the very same spot and it fished out a nice size fish for dinner. Our old polluted creek is recovering nicely and we hope to host many other interesting birds in the future! Kat

It’s a Sunday morning, and I am watching a single male on our pond outside of Kalamazoo, MI. I’ve never seen a bufflehead before; I hope he’ll stick around for a while, because he is a beauty and really fun to watch!

I looked it up: Plautus reads simply: “quid me aspectas, stolide?” (Why are you looking at me, Stupid?) I was really hoping he’d have Mercury call Amphitryon a bullhead, but no. Echard seems to have quite the vituperative vocabulary; after rendering the line “What makes ye stare so, Bufflehead?” he goes on to have Mercury call his antagonist “rogue,” “blockhead,” and “old dog.”

Learn something new every day! (And the earliest attestation of the insult is from 1659, nearly 40 years before Echard.)

Lol. I like what you unearthed, Rick. I find it interesting that ‘stolide’ translates as ‘stupid’ or more colorfully ‘bufflehead’ when the English derivation ‘stolid’ now just means unemotional or apathetic. Fascinating.